I also began playing with Jacqui McShee who had been out in Paris singing with a friend of mine from the Kingston days. As well as American material, Jacqui also sang beautiful versions of British traditional songs which gave me an opportunity to work out accompaniments based on Davey's ideas from his recordings with Shirley Collins, as well as drawing on some approaches found in Early Music.
Jacqui sang on a few tracks on my first records but we didn't get to explore her repertoire until later. By then I was under contract to the Transatlantic company and on at least two of those albums, "Sir John Alot" and "Lady And The Unicorn", I made instrumental arrangements of songs that I had learned from Jacqui.
Jacqui, Bert and myself used to play at the 'Cousins' in various combinations. Once in a while Alexis would come down with a trio and it was a natural progression to ask Danny and Terry to join us. At first it was a good way of lasting out the all-nighters, but we found that we had a lot of musical common ground and we became a band.
We called ourselves "Pentangle" after the emblem on Sir Gawain's shield in the story of the Green Knight. The music was a loose mixture of all our influences, initially much of it improvised on the stand. Bert and I were both still under contract to Transatlantic as solo artists and the company, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to record the band.
The first recording, "The Pentangle", was picked up by Warner Bros. in America and things started happening fast. We toured America in 1968 playing prestigious gigs like Carnegie Hall and the Newport Folk Festival, which was nice as we finally got to meet some of the old timers including Jesse Fuller himself.
We also played the Fillmores, East and West, working alongside James Taylor and The Grateful Dead. A good time was had by all and the band went through a fairly intensive period of recording into the early seventies. The last album was "Solomon's Seal" which got hung up in some contractual difficulties but is probably the best of the group efforts.
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